Destiny 2 has been under some intense criticism from its core fans on various social media platforms since a week or so after the game released on September 4.

Player numbers across all platforms have dropped dramatically and even many of the so-called “hardcore” players have stopped playing the game altogether. After staying very silent about the criticisms, developer Bungie instead started promoting the next piece of DLC content, without acknowledging the fan disillusionment.

Curse of Osiris, a new purchasable expansion for the game, is released on December 5. However, instead of the excitement that preceded previous expansions for Destiny, the Curse of Osiris (CoO) expansion was met with a resounding shrug by the fan base at large.

You can watch the official trailer for Curse of Osiris below, which is available only for those who own the base game on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

So what’s the problem? Well, fans simply weren’t interested in more content with the same basic design philosophy that was, in their minds, already broken. The game would still inherently have the same problems that the base game did, which were not pleasing.

Bungie then made the decision to cancel the third of three live streams promoting the expansion, and instead release some detailed notes on various quality of life and endgame changes they were working on.

The full notes can be found HERE if you want the low down on everything coming to the game soon. There is far too much content here for me to summarize completely without simple duplication, so go have a look for yourself when you are finished reading this.

The question remains of whether Bungie have done enough, or are planning to do enough to overhaul a game that is frankly dying within two months of release. And remember, this wa a game that was supposed to last for at least two years. The answer isn’t an easy yes or no I’m afraid. Like blockbuster movies, games can be a hard juggling act, but we will try and get to the crux (of Crota) of this issue here.

The updates they have already announced are planned to drop across three separate patch updates, the first one being on December 5, the day of the CoO DLC content release, the second on December 12, merely a week later, and then a further patch due to drop in January some time.

While I think fans appreciate the candid nature of Bungie’s recent communication and the speed to which they seem to be committing to making these changes, I think the community were ultimately looking for more promises about how they will look at fundamental design choices. The design of the core game can’t simply be changed in a patch. In fact, we cannot even say for certain whether it can be changed at all at this point.

We think it’s fair to say that some fans have suddenly went into Bungie love overdrive, a complete overreaction by the way. That being said, it’s also fair to say that many fans, while pleased with almost all the changes, are wary enough of Bungie now to ask the harder questions. I count myself amongst the fan base of Destiny, I may be the only one of my 30+ clan of Destiny players that still occasionally load up Destiny 2 in its current state, and I am also one of those people willing to ask the harder questions.

The feeling I get from the lists of changes is that these were probably things being worked on for the most part since even before the game went live on September 4. For me, Bungie has not in any way addressed the criticism of many of their design choices, choices that were changed from the very popular original game.

Bungie made a very clear choice to try and make the game a more casual experience. The goal here is clear: make your game more accessible and the more casual players will purchase the game. New gamers wouldn’t find it too hard to keep up with the heavier hitting players, and may well be encouraged enough to purchase the expansion packs. They did this through several changes, including reducing the amount of rare and very powerful pieces of gear that fans could work towards. They also heavily reduced the impact that power level had by making all enemies scale up to the level of the player. The problem fans had with this was it reduced the desire to keep playing in order to earn these items, and even then the feeling of being powerful once you get to maximum level just wasn’t there.

For a more detailed run-through of the problems the game has currently, check out our previous article on the issue:

Some of these issues look to have been touched on with the announced updates. There are, however, also very fundamental design choices which they have not acknowledged yet, meaning we don’t know if Bungie are with or against the fan base on these issues yet.

On the next page of the article is a list of some pressing concerns not mentioned in this update. Now, it is quite possible that these changes would take far longer to implement and I wouldn’t necessarily expect to see these designs changed as quickly as this. If Bungie however, had even mentioned that they are looking at these aspects for the future, I think it would have given fans more hope that the game could be brought back to a level they expect.

But go ahead and click below for the rundown of the pressing concerns NOT in the update.

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